The Rose Bowl shifted from ABC to ESPN, its superior at the Walt Disney Company, which owns them both. The Fiesta, Orange and Sugar Bowls left Fox for ESPN, as did the B.C.S. title game, which will be played Monday.

The shift was primarily about ESPN’s outbidding Fox by $100 million to carry the games from 2011 to 2014. The effect of this broadcast-to-cable shift is usually a drop in viewership. Old-line networks play to 116 million TV homes; ESPN has about 100 million subscribers.

With ESPN reaching 86 percent of the broadcast universe, some viewers, somewhere, are being disenfranchised. As sports have moved to cable, we’ve seen the viewership fall. It has happened in the N.B.A., the British Open, “Monday Night Football,” the Breeders’ Cup and Nascar. The nine Chase for the Sprint Cup races that left ABC for ESPN last year had a 20 percent drop in viewers, to 4.4 million.

And, predictably, viewership fell for the Rose (14 percent), Fiesta (30 percent) and Orange (22 percent) Bowls from the games that played in the comparable time slots last year. The Sugar Bowl on Tuesday reversed the trend, with a 25 percent gain in Ohio State’s 31-26 win over Arkansas.

Despite three out of four bowls losing viewers from last year, ESPN is jubilant. Each news release trumpets their place in cable history: the Rose’s audience was the third largest in all of cable history; the Orange’s was ESPN’s “fourth-highest-rated and second-most-viewed non-N.F.L. game telecast,” and the Sugar’s was “ESPN’s second-highest-rated and second-most-viewed non-N.F.L. game.”

The declines are largely about the shift to cable, but also about matchups, teams with national reputations, and blowouts (like the Fiesta and Orange). Texas Christian’s 21-19 win over Wisconsin in the Rose Bowl was a taut game, but neither team has the cachet of Ohio State, which beat Oregon in last year’s Rose Bowl.

Oklahoma’s 48-20 win in the Fiesta was over a team, Connecticut, that was not a B.C.S. regular. And the five big bowls lacked big-name programs like Florida and Alabama, which played in the Outback and Capital One Bowls, or Southern California and Texas.

ESPN does not have to beat past broadcast numbers to succeed. It is ESPN. It is its own gigantic if insular universe, where the past (if it’s not its own) matters very little. Leagues and governing bodies rush to ESPN for its money and its myriad media platforms.

Photo

The Orange Bowl moved to ESPN this year, and viewership fell 22 percent. ESPN was happy with that.Credit
Streeter Lecka/Getty Images

After the Rose and Fiesta results were in, Burke Magnus, ESPN’s senior vice president for college sports, said in an interview: “We’re pleased with these numbers, and with three more B.C.S. games to play we’ll stack up well and the broadcast-to-cable comparisons will not matter. There’s no broadcast-to-cable case to be made.”

But there is. It’s at the heart of the battle between broadcasters and cable networks over creating a substantial revenue stream from retransmission fees that can give ad-supported networks a weapon against the subscriber fees that cable networks like ESPN wield like a financial cudgel.

Brad Adgate, the senior vice president for research at Horizon Media, said that cable networks anticipated lower viewership when programming shifted to cable.

“Advertisers generally pay lower rates for cable,” he said. “It’s part of the equation.” But, he said, the gap in viewership between broadcast and cable was narrowing and “ESPN is leading the trend.”

To advertisers, he added, it is more important that “Monday Night Football” is the second-ranked prime-time program among adults 18 to 49 (behind NBC’s “Sunday Night Football”) than that its overall rating on ESPN since 2006 has not equaled what it got on ABC from 1970 to 2005.

Ultimately, that does not matter to ESPN. It celebrates, on an almost weekly basis, its “Monday Night” performance, as it will the rest of its B.C.S. achievements.

To that point, Magnus said it was possible to play in ESPN’s universe and still have more viewers for a bowl game than one on broadcast TV. Sure it is, especially if the cable event has a better matchup or a tighter game or higher-ranked teams — and the comparison is to one of the least-viewed past bowls. Of course, it can also be serendipity.

¶ESPN’s Sugar Bowl viewership of 13.6 million beat the 10.9 million for last year’s Iowa’s 24-14 win over Georgia Tech in the Orange Bowl, which was played on the comparable Tuesday night.

¶ESPN’s Fiesta Bowl viewership of 10.8 million exceeded the 9.3 million for the 2009 Sugar Bowl (Virginia Tech 20, Cincinnati 7), which Fox carried in the same prime-time New Year’s Day slot.

¶This year’s Rose Bowl attracted more viewers than the 2008 version on ABC (U.S.C. 49, Illinois 17, the most lopsided Rose since 1984), which drew only 19 million. Only 2 of this year’s 35 bowl games are not carried by the ESPN group of networks.

For the non-B.C.S. games carried by ESPN through Jan. 1, viewership was down to 3.9 million from an average of 4.1 million through the same period last year. “Every year is a little different,” Magnus said. “You just never know when you’ll get an exciting game like the Pinstripe Bowl” — which had 3.5 million viewers for its first go-round.

Correction: January 12, 2011

The TV Sports column on Thursday, about viewership of college football bowl games as they migrate from broadcast television to cable, misidentified the bowl last year in which Iowa defeated Georgia Tech 24-14. It was the Orange Bowl, not the Sugar Bowl.

E-mail: sandor@nytimes.com

A version of this article appears in print on January 6, 2011, on page B18 of the New York edition with the headline: Viewership Less Urgent As Bowls Go to Cable. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe